Dopamine Nation (10/10)

This was a very insightful book. Knowing the balance between pain and pleasure is essential to living in modern day society. Where scarcity is no longer an issue. Our brains are not adapted for a world of abundance. So the forces that kept us alive for thousands of years, are now making us miserable. Consider this a primer into understanding addiction and over consumption. And steps you can take to mitigate this.

Summary and Highlights

Being sick and tired is a result of a skewed pain/pleasure balance. In order to find balance, you must understand the relationship between pleasure and pain in the body. Pleasure and pain operate in the same area of the brain and are intertwined.

Compulsive consumption leads to pain. And we all can face consumption issues. Even if we have good lives.

There are many factors that increase risk for over consumption and addiction. These include:

• Biology
• Mental illness
• Trauma
• Genetics
• Poverty

“Limbic capitalism” is the market force that profits on consumption. This provides access hyper novel and more potent substances and behaviors. More than any time in history.

Even the internet suggests behaviors that we would have not thought of doing in the first place. Porn and TikTok come to mind. We see crazy behaviors as “Normal” because other people on the internet are doing them.

The rush is never as good as you imagine.

Kids these days are growing up in padded environments and not ready for the real world. We have made them afraid of adversity and are encouraging hedonism and escapism.

We can’t even put up with minor discomforts like being bored. We are always seeking out novelty and entertainment.

Go 30 minutes a day with nothing but your thoughts. This will help you become familiar with yourself, others, and the world. You are no longer running from painful thoughts and emotions.

Boredom can be terrifying. It makes you think about big issues, meaning, and purpose. Boredom is an opportunity. You may discover something new. It gives your mind space to think.

You may attribute fatigue and the inability to focus to mental illness. But it could also be from sleep deprivation, over consumption, and over stimulation.

The reason we are so miserable is because we are trying so hard not to be miserable.

Why too much pleasure leads to pain.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in reward processing. It plays a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of having the reward.

The brains reward pathway includes these parts of the brain:

• Ventral tegmental
• Nucleus accumbens
• Prefrontal cortex

The more/faster dopamine released from a drug or behavior, the more addictive the drug or behavior is.

Pleasure and pain function as a balance in the brain. When one side of the balance is weighted down, the brain compensates by pushing down on the opposite side. Pleasure leads to pain, pain leads to pleasure.

The brain wants to maintain homeostasis.

Opponent process theory states that any prolonged or repeated departures from hedonic or effective neutrality have a cost.

With prolonged exposure to pleasure, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.

The negative feedback caused by tolerance

Repeated exposure to a pleasure stimulus makes the pleasure from that stimulus less and less. And the rebound to the pain side gets stronger and longer. You need more of a behavior or substance over time to feel the same amount of pleasure.

Over time, your baseline gets set to the side of pain, as your brain tries to counteract bigger and more potent doses of pleasure. See how this bird starts out normal and healthy, then eventually needs it’s drug just to feel normal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo

People who do Opioids for a long time often experience more pain not less. This is referred to as “opioid induced hyperglasia”.

Heavy and prolonged dopamine leads to a baseline that is dopamine deficient. Hedonism leads to ahedonia.

Universal symtoms of withdrawl include:

• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Insomnia
• Dysphoria

The pain from withdrawl is what drives people to relapse, withdrawl is the pleasure/pain balance tipping towards the side of pain.

If you wait long enough, you can reset your dopamine baseline. (in most cases) And you can regain pleasure in simple things like going for walks, listening to birds, reading, writing, watching the sun rise, etc.

Dopamine cues

Cue dependant learning or pavlovian conditioning is when dopamine is released in the brain in response to a conditioned cue. This leads to pleasure in anticipation of a reward. When the cue happens, dopamine drops below baseline, which leads us to seek out the reward.

Dopamine levels below baseline drive craving. The cycle of craving can occur outside of conscious awareness. Dopamine levels raise once we get the reward, but falls below baseline if the reward doesn’t happen.

Loss chasing: when the uncertainty of getting a reward is as reinforcing as the reward it self. Like gambling or likes on social media.

These conditioned reward pathways can cause permanent brain changes. But new pathways can always be forged with dopamine-healthy activities like human connection or exercise.

Even learning releases dopamine.

Balance is person independent.

Pleasure and pain can happen at the same time like with spicy food. Something that one person finds pleasurable or painful may not be the same for someone else. And not everyone starts with a level balance.

People injured in war are sometimes in less pain because they are pulled into a safer environment when they are being treated.

“We are Cacti in a rainforest” -Dr. Tom Finucane. Our brains have evolved for a world of scarcity, but we live in a new world of abundance.

Dopamine Fasting

We must abstain from the unwanted behavior in order to truly have clarity on how it effects us. High dopamine subtances or behaviors cloud or ability to see cause and effect. And young people are more immune to immediate negative impacts than adults.

Here are 8 steps to a dopamine fast:

1. Get information on the details of your dopamine use. What, when, how often?
2. Find out your personal reason for doing the dopamine inducing behavior. Even seemingly irrational behavior is often rooted in personal logic.
3. What problems is the drug or behavior causing? Short term? Long term?
4. Go for a set period without the drug or behavior.
5. Use mindfulness to observe your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations as separate from yourself.
6. Abstaining gives new insight to the behaviors.
7. Decide if you will continue using in a controlled way. Or go completely without.
8. Experiment to find out what works and what doesn’t.

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”

Do you want to be doing this 10 years from now? How about 5? 1? 6 months from now? You may as well try to stop now. Consider your current behaviors for your future self.

You must go without the drug or behavior in order to reset your dopamine baseline and to truly see the cause and effect between substance use and how you feel.

You can’t replace one drug with another because you will still be weighing down the pleasure side of the balance. And something less potent won’t feel like a reward because your baseline for pleasure is too high.

If you don’t feel better after a dopamine fast then you may have some other underlying medical problem. But you will feel worse before you feel better. Withdrawl can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months or longer.

Use mindfulness to observe without judging yourself. Have compassion for yourself. The thoughts and emotions you have been running from will come crashing down on you during withdrawl. Instead of running, tolerate it.

Don’t forget that moderation can backfire.

Limit access through self-binding.

Self-binding is placing barriers between you and the reward to help get over the limitations of willpower. Willpower gets tired the more we use it. This is a tool, not a fail safe.

You do self binding while your will is strong. Not when the cue, routine, reward cycle has already started and your willpower goes down.

Make it harder to access the reward.

This can be through physical barriers or distance. Such as a ksafe or weight loss surgeries. It can also be based on time limits and finish lines. Such as setting a time of day to use or a reward for accomplishing something.

Track your usage to become more aware. Overall awareness will help mitigate consumption.

Delay discounting is when high dopamine messes with our ability to delay gratification. “Temporal horizons” shrink when we are under the spell of a drug. You become governed by the pleasure-pain balance, instead of by reason. You can no longer objectively evaluate immediate rewards vs their long term counterparts.

The opposite is also true, immediate rewards activate emotion and reward parts of the brain. When you delay rewards, you activate the prefrontal cortex. Which is involved in planning and abstract thinking.

Categorical self binding is avoiding anything that could entertain your addict mind. Like how scrolling instagram can lead to seeking out porn. Sort dopamine into categories. Ones that you will allow yourself to consume, and ones you do not. This helps avoid triggers that lead to craving.

This is useful for substances that we can’t eliminate all together but want to have a healthier relationship with like food, sex, smartphones, etc.

This can fail if you accidentally include a triggering behavior in your list of acceptable behaviors.

You can also transform an object into a symbol of restraint. Such as putting a single beer on display to remind you of what you are doing.

Rather than feeling restrained by this new way of living, you will feel liberated.

Intimacy from drugs doesn’t last.

There are drugs may help with addictions, but have the potential to become addictive themselves. Perscription stimulants like adderal are the molecular equivalent to meth. They cause huge spikes of dopamine and have high high potential for abuse.

These drugs could also potentially make things worse in the long run and have unintended consequences.

ADHD drug treatment is associated with deterioration in academic and social-emotional functioning.

Antidepressants may lead to tolerance and dependence and make depression worse in the long run (tardive dysphoria).

Instead of feeling better than well, these drugs may make us feel other than well. And can limit our ability to experience the full range of emotions needed for a balanced life.

We may be making large portions of the population indifferent to intolerable circumstances. Corporations and governments have the potential to use drugs as a form of social control.

There are as many as 10,000 toddlers receiving stimulants like ritalin.

When you are numb to everything, you lose your hunger for anything. Medications can be lifesaving, but there are other tools than can help.

Why you should lean on pain

We feel great after a cold shower. The first seconds are painful, tell yourself this is temporary.

Dopamine and norepinephrine levels rise 250 and 530% above baseline respectively. And remain elevated hours after. And have been shown to raise serotonin and neuronal growth.

Pressing on the pain side of the balance can lead to pleasure. The dopamine that results is indirect and potentially longer lasting. Just like how the body restores balance by leaning toward pain after a pleasure stimuli, the body will restore balance towards pleasure from a painful stimuli.

“With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.” -pg 145 Dopamine Nation

Socrates on the relationship between pain and pleasure:

“How strange would appear to be this thing that men call pleasure! And how curiously it is related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a man, and yet if you seek the one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. . . . Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up.” -pg 147 Dopamine Nation

Hormesis

Using pain to treat pain has been around forever.

Hormesis is the study of using small doses of “pain” to trigger the body’s adaptive processes. (Cold, heat, gravitational changes, radiation, food restriction, exercise, etc.) These adaptive processes improve tolerance and functionality of the system to harder challenges.

Intermittent fasting in animals increased life span, reduced blood pressure, and improved Heart Rate Variability.

“Exercise is immediately toxic to cells, leading to increased temperatures, noxious oxidants, and oxygen and glucose deprivation. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that exercise is health-promoting, and the absence of exercise, especially combined with chronic sedentary feeding—eating too much all day long—is deadly.”

Exercise increases many of the neurotransmitters involved in positive mood regulation: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioid peptides (endorphins). Exercise contributes to the birth of new neurons and supporting glial cells. Exercise even reduces the likelihood of using and getting addicted to drugs." -pg 150 Dopamine Nation

Dopamine and movement are deeply connected. Do obtain what we desire, we need to go get it. Do drugs just remind us that we have bodies?

Exercise is more beneficial to positive mood, sleep, cognition than any pill. Even a 30 minute walk is beneficial. Just remember that pleasure comes AFTER pain.

The extreme side of pain can cause it’s own addiction. So be careful. Too much pain can deplete dopamine, causing overconsumption. So just slightly lean into pain. Build progress over time.

Truth telling

Telling the truth is another “pain leads to pleasure”. You can trick yourself when you are lying. So you are inhibiting self-awareness as well when you tell the truth. Writing in a journal is a good way to master yourself with truth telling.

Denial is caused by the disconnect between our reward pathway and higher brain regions. (Prefrontal cortex)

Prefrontal coretex is involved in planning, storytelling, decision making, emotional regulation, etc.

Telling the truth activates the prefrontal cortex and strengthens it through repeated use.

Awareness

What behavior or habit do you want to change? Why? And what would you be giving up if you stopped that behavior? What is one step you can take to change the behavior?

Honesty makes connections with other humans

We assume people will abandon us when we expose our vulnerabilities. But they really assure other people of their own doubts, fears, and weaknesses.

Human connection increases Oxytocin. Oxytocin binds to dopamine-secreting neurons and enhances the reward circuit tract. Human connection replaces addiction.

Consuming leads to isolation. Because you replace the reward you get from Human connections with artificial rewards.

Human connection can be exploited as an addiction as well. When it is used for selfish gratifications rather than through shared humanity. Like when people are Grandstanding and manipulating.

Do not share stories about your addictions to show off. Only share them to teach lessons. Tell accurate stories about yourself. Do not play the victim. Take responsibility. Accurate stories help you make accurate decisions.

Write down your character defects and ways those hurt your relationships.

Social media has led us to creating false self’s about what our lives are really like. If we don’t feel real, we isolate and become depersonalized.

Honesty tethers ourselves to reality and makes us feel real in the world.

Getting control of your addictions can lead others to do the same.

Keep your promises to children. The children benefit and are better able to regulate their emotions.

People will feel more confident around you because they can trust you.

Prosocial Shame

Destructive shame is when the group condemns or shuns when someone makes a mistake. Over consumption leads to shame, which leads to lying, which leads to isolation, which continues the circle to over consumption.

Prosocial shame is when the group holds us closer and provides steps to redemption. It says that shame is useful for thriving communities. We all have our flaws and need forgiveness. Instead of leading to lying, it leads to truth telling and acceptance and breaks the cycle of addiction.

If we are open and honest to our children about our mistakes and struggles, children will be more open and honest with us about theirs. Admit when we have been wrong.

We feel deeply connected to others when we feel accepted despite our flaws.

Social media makes us compare ourselves to the entire world. Leading us to believe we should have done more.

Immerse ourselves in the world instead of turning away from it.

Finding balance does not happen instantly. It requires patience, courage, and maintenance. You must have faith that the small actions you take every day will pay off in the future.

If you made it this far…

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